What's So Special About A Blog

First, the technical side. Many free softwares exist that allow most people, even those without any web authoring experience, to create a presence on the web, as long as they have access to a computer and an internet connection. This need not be an individual computer and internet connection. Many writers outside the US add to their blogs regularly via public internet cafes, for example. Read What's a Blog? for a succinct introduction to blogging.

The relative ease of access to web writing via a blog encourages individuals to write regularly, to update their weblogs from many different locations, and, most importantly for capstone, to reflect on, as Douglas Adams would have it, "Life, love, the universe, everything."

Individuals all over the world maintain blogs (or web logs) on virtually every subject you can imagine. One of the most famous is Salam Pax (a pseudonym) who started writing a web log from Bagdhad in December 2002. For the ironic (and iconic) story of this blog's beginnings, and its growing importance as the Gulf War, part II, broke out, read, "I Became the Profane Pervert Arab Blogger."

On 26 August, 2006, The Washington Post published an article analyzing views of the war in Northern Israel and Southern Lebanon expressed in individual writers' blogs. The article points out that several bloggers found common ground with those "on the other side' via blogging contacts:

...in the midst of war, scouring online for views from the other side has been one way for Lebanese and Israelis to alleviate the terrible sense of the impotence of standing by as their countries bled. Thousands of people, often posting in English, seem compelled to try to make some sense of the chaos -- or, through personal narratives, to help debunk stereotypes and misperceptions.

Bloggers from both sides of the border . . . have been providing live updates, commenting on one another's blogs and sometimes linking to posts by bloggers on the other side of the border," wrote Lisa Goldman, a Canadian-Israeli blogger and journalist, on her site On the Face six days into the war. "Will this turn out to be the first time that residents of 'enemy' countries engaged in an ongoing conversation while missiles were falling?"

…English is a convenient lingua franca. The Lebanese blogosphere, drawing from a trilingual Arabic-, French- and English-speaking population, is chiefly English. So when the war broke out, many Hebrew-language bloggers switched to English in a deliberate attempt to reach across the border.

Sample blogs: On the Face (Israel) & Beirut Spring (Lebanon). See also Global Voices Online which links bloggers around the world).

The lead editorial in The Economist (August 26th to September 1st) also recognized the potential power of blogging (sometimes called citizen-journalism) as an alternative to mainstream news media:

The web has opened the closed world of professional editors and reporters to anyone with a keyboard and internet connection. Several companies have been chastened by amateur postings – of flames erupting from Dell's laptops or of cable-TV repairmen asleep on the sofa. Each blogger is capable of bias and slander, but, taken as a group, bloggers offer the searcher after truth boundless material to chew over..."

In an academic context, blogs allow us – also "searchers after truth" – to nurture what are called communities of practice, a concept coined by Etienne Wenger to describe the activities of groups of people who come together around common interests and shared expertise. I certainly think Capstone constitutes a community of practice, even if we don't explicitly call it that. Blogs allow the members of a community of practice, where individuals do not all necessarily have web authoring talents, to build a public presence, which others, perhaps with similar interests in reflective learning and portfolio building, might share.